Apple Announces Next Operating System – OS X Mavericks

By Paul Thomson :: 1:44 PM

Apple today announced the next version of its computer operating system – it will be called OS X Mavericks. The announcement came during the keynote portion of Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference, held in San Francisco.

The name Mavericks is a departure from the previous OS X naming scheme, which used big cats: Panther, Leopard, and Mountain Lion, for example. Mavericks is a surfing location in Northern California, and the announcement revealed that Apple is moving toward a “California place” naming scheme. As a joke, an image of a sea lion appeared on the screen briefly during the demonstration, causing many to wrongly assume that the name of the next OS was OS X Sea Lion.

Among the new functionality in Mavericks is a much-touted suite of CPU management tools, which can reduce CPU usage by over 50%.  Significant changes have also been revealed for the Safari web browser, and Apple’s Mail client.

A Developer Preview version of the OS will be made available today, and it will be generally available to the public sometime in the fall.